On August 9th, 2022, President Joe Biden officially signed the Chip and Science Act. Under the $54.2 billion support for the U.S. semiconductor industry, the bill also clearly states that "subsidized companies cannot make significant expansions in China and related countries regarding the semiconductor industry for ten years." At the same time, the United States also formed a chip alliance with other semiconductor industry powerhouses such as South Korea, with frequent actions.
The future development of China's domestic chips to replace imported chips has become a foregone conclusion, the relevant industrial applications are in urgent need of development. Water drop laser as the domestic laser cleaning field leader and pioneer, but also in the continuous investment in research and development costs, to explore the possibility of the application of laser cleaning machine in the chip manufacturing industry, hoping to accelerate the development of China's semiconductor industry to do their bit.
In the chip manufacturing industry, semiconductor cleaning throughout the industry, the steps account for more than 30% of the total production process, is a key process affecting the quality of wafers and chip performance, with a market space of more than 40 billion. Although in the importance and equipment market scale is not as important as the lithography and other core equipment, but as an irreplaceable link to the chip production yield and economic benefits of manufacturers have a vital impact.
Currently, as the chip manufacturing process continues to improve the level of sophistication, the requirements for the control of wafer surface contaminants continue to improve, after each step of lithography, etching, deposition and other repetitive processes, a step cleaning process is required, it is certain that the cleaning process is the most frequent of all processes, and will further increase in the future.
When the process node reaches 10nm in 2018, the silicon wafer requirements for cleaning parameters reach a certain height: surface particles and COP density less than 0.1 / c㎡, the surface critical metal element density less than 2.5 * 10⁹at / c㎡. At present, a few domestic enterprises can do 7nm process node, and like TSMC, Samsung, etc. can already mass production 3nm, in the impact to 2nm, the requirements for cleaning will only be higher.
The current wafer cleaning methods are immersion, rotary spray, mechanical brushing, ultrasonic, megasonic, plasma, gas phase, beam flow, etc., mainly using a combination of wet cleaning and dry cleaning, wet cleaning is the mainstream, but there will be slight damage to the material, such as the generation of graphic damage, COP (100nm or so cavity), etc., dry cleaning as a cleaner cleaning technology in the production line part of the application, the Prospects are more promising.
Laser cleaning machine as a dry cleaning, for the wafer production process of surface contamination - such as dust particles, metals, organic matter, oxides, etc. have a good cleaning effect, and the accuracy of the effect is more controllable, but there is no more mature domestic application examples, water drop laser to share our wafer surface Roughing process report, hope that the future of laser cleaning can be further involved in the chip manufacturing process.
As an emerging industrial cleaning technology, laser cleaning machine has not yet been heard in China as an example of practical application in the production process of wafers. But in the preliminary cleaning tests can be seen, laser cleaning in the semiconductor field is still promising, just before no one has done the preliminary technical attempts. We will further explore the possibility of laser cleaning in the chip manufacturing application later, to help the development of China's semiconductor industry.
